Consumers don't have to work very hard to see that the men selling themselves for the job of America's CEO have packed a lot into their simple logos, honed and deployed like never before in a national political campaign.

In some ways, the designs use the same tricks. Last name, first initial. The right shades of red, white and blue. Neither makes a murky endorsement of their man. We all know who O is, and we've seen enough commercials interrupting "Dancing with the Stars" to get that R-omney is running with Paul R-yan and they're both R-epublicans.

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It's a funny, phonetic choice though, relying on a letter more than a concrete image, like say, a flag or something with a silhouette of the U.S. The candidates might have picked a friendly face like Betty Crocker as their insignia, or a fruit like Apple.

Because in a literary country like ours, where even T-shirts and automobiles display words, our first impulse when we see a letter is to actually read it. So it's not just the symbols we interpret but the sounds, and that's where a candidate can lose control of things.

There's some danger there, and opportunity. Little noises can be heard loud and clear during a campaign where neither guy seems able to get out his deeper sounds. If an electorate can't be make it past No. 2 of your five-point plan, a single syllable might be all you can communicate.

And so Romney, soaring on the convenient winds of alliteration, puts forward his matchy-matchy letters in a very Romney way.

His upper-case repetitiveness sends out a message of strength, consistency, power. Linked so closely, even dependent upon each other, the letters present a sense of unity; if there's a GOP split between the Tea Partiers and the Old Guard, you wouldn't know it from this brand.

Romney's mark doesn't use purely serif type for its "R," but the bend in the right knee and the way the leg ends in a delicate point gives it the same feel. It is fancy and formal, carries a rich and regal flair. Those are R-words Republicans run from.

Obama goes in the opposite direction. His basic blue "O" is austere, focused. It telegraphs a message of clarity and purpose. Perfectly round, it promises a holistic sort of leadership that favors no special interest, even ignoring Joe Biden's presence on the ticket.

The president's own embellishment is the addition of three horizontal ribs that appear to stretch out from the "O" as if they were the Great Plains themselves. The "O" portrays Obama as not just the ruler of the earth, but the very earth itself, redistributing his bountiful cornucopia across the land. He might as well have used an "S" — as in Socialist.

True, most voters will ignore the logos; clever symbols lack influence when your ballot is pretty much cast before the primaries are even over.

But for those few in the middle, who have trouble sorting between flips and flops, little things serve as clues. Graphic design can matter as much as a candidate's stand on Afghanistan, or at least as much as his haircut.

A good voter doesn't need to know the issues this election, just the alphabet.

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